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Atkins Named to SEC Top Job |
President-elect Donald Trump named Patomak Global Partners founder and CEO Paul Atkins as his pick to head up the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.
Atkins, who co-chairs the Digital Chamber's Token Alliance and is an adviser to Reserve, previously served as a commissioner at the agency under former President George W. Bush between 2002 and 2008.
The former regulator visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida resort, earlier this week but was initially reluctant to take on the role, CoinDesk reported Tuesday. In his announcement, Trump called Atkins a "proven leader." "He believes in the promise of robust, innovative capital markets that are responsive to the needs of Investors, & that provide capital to make our Economy the best in the World," he said on his social media platform Truth Social. "He also recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before."
Unlike some of Trump's other picks which seemed designed as aggressive efforts to shake up their departments, Atkins is an old-guard figure in the U.S. securities world. He's unlikely to tear apart the agency he previously served as a commissioner and has stayed connected to in his consulting work. His firm employs several former officials from the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He will succeed outgoing SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who previously announced he'd resign at noon on Jan. 20, when Trump is sworn into office as the U.S.'s 47th president. Under Gensler, the regulator has taken on a number of enforcement actions against crypto companies, including several premised on the idea that some crypto exchanges are simultaneously operating as unlicensed exchanges, clearinghouses and brokers. In doing so, Gensler drew the ire of much of the crypto industry. It remains to be seen how Atkins may view these cases. |
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Top Crypto Gifts for 2024 DePIN gadgets. A Web3 phone. A crypto gift card. A programmable hoodie. When it comes to crypto, we normally think of virtual things. But there are plenty of ways to get physical this holiday season. CoinDesk teamed up with DIMO to curate this guide to all things crypto hardware. It contains nine cool hardware ideas, from NFC-encrusted nails to a state-of-the-art wallet to a “burner card” for stablecoins. Enjoy and give the gift of crypto this holiday season. |
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One Year of Milei, Crypto Favorite |
It has been almost exactly a year since Javier Milei became the 59th President of Argentina.
Inaugurated on December 10, 2023, the flamboyant libertarian economist — a former goalkeeper who cloned his dogs and called central banks “the worst garbage that exists on this Earth” — had vowed to end the South American nation’s hyperinflation crisis and to drastically reduce government spending. Since then, Argentina’s monthly inflation rate has fallen from 25.5% in December 2023 to 2.7% last October. The government has registered a fiscal surplus for nine months in a row, a substantial achievement considering it’s been running deficits since 2008. The Argentinian peso isn’t in freefall against the U.S. dollar anymore. And while the country’s economy is projected to have shrunk by 4% in 2024, a 6% rebound is expected in 2025.
For at least some, the biggest surprise so far is that Milei actually followed through on most of his campaign promises, according to Alfonso Campenni, Latin American growth lead at Matter Labs, the main developer behind the Ethereum layer-2 protocol ZKsync.
“For Argentinians, it’s super hard to understand the concept of a politician doing his job,” Campenni, a native of Buenos Aires, told CoinDesk in an interview. “At this time of the year, people are usually mad because they can’t buy things for Christmas [because of hyperinflation]. But now it’s like: ‘Okay, maybe this is something new.’ It’s peaceful, it’s super weird.” “I was at a tech event where Milei was invited. He got a standing ovation when he arrived on stage,” Jack Saracco, another Buenos Aires native and the co-founder of crypto payment platform Ping, told CoinDesk. “Most Argentinian crypto people love what he’s doing. There’s a meme going around: ‘When are we going to be able to vote for him again? Because I would vote for him over and over again. He's doing exactly what I voted for.’”
The reforms have had costs, though. Argentina’s poverty rate spiked to almost 53% in the first six months of 2024, from roughly 42% in the second part of 2023, as Milei’s administration slashed funding for a number of welfare programs and laid off tens of thousands of public employees. “During the campaign, he said, ‘I won't lie to the Argentinians, we have very tough years ahead of us,’” Campenni said. “He was super honest on what will happen [in the years to come].” The crypto sector’s enthusiasm for Milei is notable considering that, unlike President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, the 54-year-old economist hasn’t shown particular interest in developing a national regulatory framework for digital assets.
“His primary focus has been addressing the country's economic crisis,” Juan Aranovich, an Argentine research analyst at crypto venture fund Ryze Labs, told CoinDesk. “These initiatives have dominated his agenda and left little room for crypto specific policies.”
Even so, the crypto scene, locally and internationally, has resonated with Milei’s brand of libertarianism. |
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Bitcoin’s Pumping. Memes Are Minting Millionaires. The bear market’s snoozing, and the bull run is here.
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Prices rise Dec. 13 at 10 a.m. ET/ 11 p.m. HKT—save $700 and get an extra 15% off with code NODE15. Don’t miss out. Register today. |
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Ethereum's Drake: Solana Has Nothing on Us |
Ethereum developer Justin Drake said his comprehensive proposal to overhaul the second-largest blockchain's consensus layer isn't about catching up with a rival, it's about sticking around for the long haul.
Drake unveiled the proposal, known as the Beam Chain, at Ethereum's biennial Devcon gathering in Bangkok last month, at a time when the network's native token ETH is lagging behind its counterparts at other major layer-1 blockchains. The Ethereum network enjoyed wide adoption over the last few years, making it more expensive and slower to use. In response, a cohort of layer-1s, known as “Ethereum killers,” emerged in 2020 to compete with Ethereum on transaction speeds, and Solana has been seen as the leader of the pack. Recently, activity on Solana has exploded, mainly thanks to the surge of memecoins on the blockchain, with users wondering whether it will overtake Ethereum as the “hot” chain.
But Drake said he doesn’t see Solana as a threat to Ethereum. Neither does he see the Beam Chain as a way to restore Ethereum’s edge in the short term.
The Beam Chain “is all about improving the long-term health and security of the consensus layer, it has nothing to do with performance,” Drake said in an interview with CoinDesk. “Solana has no consideration for health. The only thing they care about is performance. They care about reducing latency and increasing throughput,” Drake added. Ethereum has tried to address the scalability challenge, by pushing forward a rollup-centric roadmap, meaning users can transact faster and more cheaply on a bunch of auxiliary networks, known as layer-2s or rollups. Popular layer-2s on top of Ethereum include Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and ZKsync. Ethereum developers have heavily relied on the layer-2s to offer faster and lower transaction fees. “I think the layer-1 is competing with Bitcoin, and the layer-2s are competing with Solana. And so it's not even part of the remit of the layer-1 to even compete with Solana," Drake said. "We should be competing on security and health. And so if there's any competition to Solana, it needs to come from the applications and from the layer-2s.”
Arbitrum for example, has a slot time, or time between blocks of transactions being published to the chain, of 250 milliseconds. "That is faster than Solana,” Drake said. (According to a recent research report from Galaxy Digital, "Solana targets slot times of 400 milliseconds, though they typically range from 500-600ms in practice.")
Drake did add, though, that there are some features for Ethereum's layer-1 that developers have worked on that will make Ethereum more competitive on speed with Solana.
The main ones are “pre-confirmations,” which speed up the confirmation of transactions and are supposed to make the user experience on Ethereum as smooth as Solana's, as well as “blobs,” a feature that allows Ethereum to process large batches of transaction data off-chain. But these are all separate from the Beam Chain, which Drake has said he is hoping to implement by 2029.
And while Solana is seeing a lot of momentum, Drake said he is tuning out the noise to focus on long-term gains for Ethereum.
“Solana is having its moment right now, but I think it's going to be the end of the Solana golden era, because all of the competitive advantages that Solana has around latency and throughput are going to melt away because of fundamental differences in architecture that don't make it scalable,” Drake said. |
Successful Trading Takes More Than a Bull Market Choosing the right exchange is crucial throughout the business cycle. This has been a very, very good month to trade in crypto. People who regularly read CoinDesk are making money just by checking their phone alerts. And yet, this environment isn’t as kind to the exchanges. Continue reading here. |
US Congress' Most Prolific Crypto Trader |
Mike Collins, a first-term Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, may not have a high profile on crypto policy, but he has a very active crypto portfolio. And his trading indicates that memecoin enthusiasm has reached the shores of Congress.
Collins, whose committee assignments keep him far from the core decisions on U.S. crypto legislation, has kept a busy hand in the buying and selling of digital assets. Earlier this week, Collins made small buys of Ski Mask Dog and Aerodrome (AERO) – each of the purchases categorized in the congressional financial filings as between $1,000 and $15,000. A trucking company operator who arrived in Congress last year, Collins is among a handful of direct crypto traders on Capitol Hill. And his is the most extensive record, according to his disclosures, with 19 trades going back to November, including in Ethereum's ether (ETH), Velodrome Finance and The Graph (GRT). When his purchase of Ski Mask Dog and AERO was noted on social media site X, he responded by posting an image of Pepe the Frog.
Ski Mask Dog is another in a long series of dog-based memecoins, which are typically volatile and often humorously inspired tokens. Aerodrome is one of the biggest decentralized exchanges on Base. Collins has an "A" rating from crypto advocates Stand With Crypto, noting his support of digital assets legislation including the high-profile Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21). And he's coming back next year, having earned 63% of the vote last month to defeat a Democrat challenger to earn his second term in the House. The Georgia congressman is better known on immigration issues, including for sponsoring his own bills empowering states against the federal government.
Direct investing by members of Congress has long been a controversial topic, with critics raising the hazards posed by potential conflicts of interest and insider trading. But trading of such assets as stocks, bonds and crypto is still on the table for members of the House and Senate, though each transaction is publicly disclosed.
Former Representative Madison Cawthorn, a North Carolina Republican, had been an even busier crypto trader than Collins before he was defeated in a primary challenge in 2022. The dollar amounts Collins has been trading are generally small, and other members of Congress have dealt with bigger sums, such as Michigan Democrat Shri Thanedar's sales of at least $365,000 in bitcoin (BTC), ETH and litecoin (LTC) in February. |
The Takeaway: Favorable Winds for Crypto |
By James Van Straten, CoinDesk analyst: Financial conditions in the U.S. are the loosest they have been in three years, according to the Chicago Fed's National Conditions Index (NFCI), a weekly gauge that takes into account factors such as leverage, debt and equity markets and traditional banking.
The readings provide insight into three specific areas: risk, credit and leverage. For the week ended Nov. 22, the index dropped to -0.64, a level not seen since August 2021 in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. A negative reading suggests financial conditions are looser than average indicating that liquidity is readily available. A positive reading, in contrast, means tighter-than-average conditions with capital hard to come by, as during the 2008 global financial crisis.
Zooming out, we're in one of the most financially loose periods since data started being collected in 1971. With U.S. headline inflation at an annual 2.6%, well above the Federal Reserve's 2% target since February 2021, it's possible 75 basis points of interest-rate cuts since September and a 4.75% rate now have done little to rein in investors' appetite for risk.
The S&P 500, for example, has ratcheted up its 55th all-time high this year, adding 28% since the start of January, according to Zerohedge. Bitcoin (BTC) has surged 118% and the total crypto market cap has more than doubled to approach $3.5 trillion, according to the TOTAL metric on TradingView.
Risk assets tend to have an inverse correlation with the DXY index, a measure of the U.S. dollar against a number of other major currencies. Typically, the index is considered strong when it's over 100. It's held over 106 since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election.
That makes bitcoin's rally particularly interesting, because it breaks the inverse behavior. The 30-day correlation between bitcoin and the DXY index is at 0.66 over the past seven years, one of the strongest levels for that period.
As financial conditions loosen and total U.S. debt hits a record $36.17 trillion, the largest cryptocurrency seems to be thriving with its ability to soak up liquidity overriding the strong dollar. |
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